In recent years, in the field of system-operations management, a document referred to as ITIL (registered trademark, referred to similarly hereinafter, abbreviation for Information Technology Infrastructure Library) regarding the know-how of good practices is gaining in popularity. The ITIL was made public in 1989 by CCTA (Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency) that is a British government agency. Since then, the ITIL has become the de facto international standard in the field of system-operations management.
In the ITIL context, the concept of CMDB (Configuration Management Database) has been proposed as the standard for managing the device configuration information (CI, Configuration Items) of a system. Thus, a CMDB represents a device configuration information database.
According to the concept of CMDB, in order to manage the device configuration information of a system, a device configuration information database is built as the database for managing the device configuration information of that system and the relationship between the device configuration information.
Herein, the device configuration of a system includes a large variety of items such as various hardware items as well as various software and data items. The implementation of device configuration information databases is called MDR (Management Data Repository). Thus, the MDR is used in managing device configuration information as well as the relationship between each set of device configuration information.
A device configuration information database placed at a higher layer that performs virtual integration of a plurality of MDRs is referred to as an FCMDB (federated CMDB). An FCMDB can obtain the intended device configuration information by searching across the MDRs placed under it.
Besides, an FCMDB has a reconciliation function for performing reconciliation of device configuration information. More particularly, the reconciliation function is used for integrating the same device configuration information managed with different names or with different local IDs on an MDR-by-MDR basis.
Herein, the challenge is how to efficiently obtain the intended data by searching across the plurality of lower layer databases from a higher layer database. That is, since the intended device configuration information is distributed across the plurality of databases in each lower layer, the speed of response to the search request is slow.
To solve such a problem, the conventional technology suggests, for example, tweaking the database structure and the data placement in the plurality of databases under a higher layer database or changing the data placement in databases for the purpose of enhancing the search efficiency.
That is, in the conventional technology, the device configuration information is organized at the time of data registration of the device configuration information or organized in a dynamic manner (while operating FCMDB) so that the related device configuration information gets arranged in an optimum fashion. In this way, in an FCMDB, it is ensured that the related device configuration information is promptly obtained from each MDR.
However, in the conventional technology, the following issues arise: it takes time to check for the optimum arrangement of the related device configuration information (issue of optimum arrangement check) and changes in the relationship affect the optimum arrangement (relationship issue). Meanwhile, since the relationship can be arbitrarily registered, deleted, or updated; the related device configuration information cannot be subjected a fixed optimum arrangement in advance.
Besides, when some device configuration information is moved, it becomes necessary to repeat the reconciliation operation (reconciliation issue). That not only results in poor efficiency but also makes it difficult for the registrants of device configuration information to figure out the location of the corresponding device configuration information (issue of location of device configuration information).
Patent Document 1: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 02-212972
Patent Document 2: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 05-12338